Video monitoring involving embedding a video characteristic in audio of a video/audio signal

Abstract

A first video characteristic value is determined from a video / audio signal. The first video characteristic value is embedded in an audio portion of the video / audio signal and the video / audio signal is transmitted from a transmission source to a transmission destination. At the destination, the first video characteristic value is recovered and the received video / audio signal is used to determine a second video characteristic value. The recovered first video characteristic value is used to verify or check the second video characteristic value. By comparing the first and second video characteristic values, a determination is made about degradation of the received video / audio signal. In one example, a determination is made as to whether a lip-sync error has likely occurred. In another example, the audio-transmitted first video characteristic is used for copyright protection purposes.

Description

TECHNICAL FIELD[0001]The present invention relates to monitoring of digital video / audio signals.BACKGROUND INFORMATION[0002]Video quality assessment is currently one of the most challenging problems in the broadcasting industry. No matter what the format of the coded video or the medium of transmission, there are always sources that cause degradation in the coded / transmitted video. Almost all of the current major broadcasters are concerned with the notion of “How good will our video look at the receiver?” Currently, there are very few practical methods and objective metrics to measure video quality. Also, most current metrics / methods are not feasible for real-time video quality assessment due to their high computational complexity.[0003]Watermarking is a technique whereby information is transmitted from a transmitter to a receiver in such a way that the information is hidden in an amount of digital media. A major goal of watermarking is to enhance security and copyright protection f...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0011]A novel monitoring method provides a reliable way to monitor the quality of video and audio, while at the same time not demanding substantially more data to be broadcast. In one example of the novel monitoring method, a first video characteristic of a video / audio signal is determined. The term “video / audio signal” as the term is used here generally refers to a signal including both a picture signal (video signal) and an associated sound signal (audio signal). The video / audio signal can be either a raw signal or may involve compressed video / audio information.

Problems solved by technology

Video quality assessment is currently one of the most challenging problems in the broadcasting industry.

No matter what the format of the coded video or the medium of transmission, there are always sources that cause degradation in the coded / transmitted video.

Almost all of the current major broadcasters are concerned with the notion of “How good will our video look at the receiver?” Currently, there are very few practical methods and objective metrics to measure video quality.

Also, most current metrics / methods are not feasible for real-time video quality assessment due to their high computational complexity.

Whenever a digital video is coded and transmitted, it undergoes some form of degradation.

This degradation may be in many forms, for example, blocking artifacts, packet loss, black-outs, lip-synch errors, synchronization loss, etc.

Unfortunately, most of the quality assessment metrics currently available rely on having some form of the original video source available at the receiver.

This significantly increases the bandwidth requirements of the transmitted video, making these methods impractical for real-time systems (e.g. broadcasting).

However, the measurement accuracy is low, and the complexity of the blind detection algorithm is high.

Due to composite processing involving compression, format conversion, resolution changes, brightness changes, filtering, etc., the embedded watermark can be easily destroyed such that it cannot then be decoded at the receiver.

This may result in either a security / copyright breach and / or distortion in the decoded video.

Also, it is often difficult to embed imperceptible watermarks in high quality videos.

Therefore, the embedding strength of video watermarking is limited by imperceptibility.

In this situation, hybrid channel distortion makes it difficult for watermarks to survive in video.

However, an error sometimes occurs during the transmission of video signals from various causes.

When an error occurs, problems, such as a video freeze, a blackout, noise, audio mute, etc., may result, and thus it becomes necessary to take countermeasures.

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